This boat demands a mission.
What that might be isn’t hard-coded.
It’s more a sense of possibility….

A boat this size and this capable not only opens up the range of travel. It makes it possible to include others. It calls out to rally a willing crew.

This boat can carry a family, one that’s grown or made. Travel in this manner is not only an adventure. It opens us to our surroundings – intimately with each nautical mile passing beneath her keel – and also to the people we meet along the way.

This is a boat I’d like to design. It’s also a Boat for difficult times. For this boat to be built requires someone with a story they’d like this vessel to carry forward. An individual, or a group…. A boat of this magnitude calls for collaboration. Building will take time. It will take wood. it will take work.

Instead of looking at boats as another thing-to-buy, a boat like this asks us to see them as an opportunity to bring us together. Not only present generations. It calls us to connect with the past. Not in empty nostalgia, but putting us “in their shoes.” We see and experience the world in ways that are hard to discover today.

I’d like this cartoon to inspire stories. Perhaps one of them will be compelling enough to get her built!

Quonnapowatt and Arethusa,
shown below at launching,
are both influences on this design.

There are two clans of Northwest Atlantic Schooners.
Those with an unadorned straight or rounded bow
and those with a clipper-bow.
An examination of this design’s possibilities
needs to consider them both.

This cartoon shows a clipper-bow and a “Fisherman Profile” for the keel and a slightly lower and shorter wheelhouse. There is more space around the mainmast for seating in this mid-ship cockpit.

I must admit I find both versions to be suitable starting places. The closest I come to a preference is that the clipper-bow has been quite popular in the Friendship Sloop revival, where-as the round bow has been rarer of late in traditionally inspired craft. I’d like to develop them both in parallel a while before committing to either.

Dimensions: